Stella McCartney Keeps It in Perspective

From left: GIVENCHY A suit with a ruffled peplum jacket and a side-vent skirt, CHLOÉ A pleated crepe ensemble over a tee, STELLA McCARTNEY a silk dress with a scalloped hem.Credit
Photographs by Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

PARIS

Everybody gets so much exposure that the need for approval trumps the fashion imperative to be different. You know this is happening because many big houses have absolutely no qualms about giving us another pleated dress with a dropped waist.

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HERMÈS A suede tunic worn over a silk top.Credit
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

That’s why Stella McCartney had such a good show on Monday. And she, of all people, knows something about media exposure as a daughter of famous parents. But the difference may be, in part, that Ms. McCartney, 40, is also the mother of four young children, so she can’t be so overly invested in the work, in people-pleasing, that the designs lose all perspective and pleasure.

Whether or not this is a conscious effort, it is a successful one because her clothes are among the most individual looking in Paris. Her main idea was to play with a wave effect, giving a curled edge to a jacket or silk dresses in white, royal blue and black. The one-shoulder body-fitting styles looked sporty, but the pastry swirls gave them a lingerie essence. Later, Ms. McCartney used the same contouring technique with inky stretch paisleys and foulard checks, adding white embroidery to finish swirled edges for an almost 3-D effect.

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STELLA McCARTNEY A quilted jacket over a matching top and mini.Credit
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Ms. McCartney also does not have that designer problem of reducing a woman’s life to one or two moments: work, a fancy party. She also makes outfits that strongly hint of home, like a piped pajama shirt worn with a matching foulard-dot pantsuit, or a loose sweater or easy all-in-one to wear to a casual dinner. And they are done with a slightly wacky sense of humor that one assumes reflects her own life and those of the people on her staff.

Riccardo Tisci also had undulating shapes in his Givenchy show, with allusions to the sea and diving gear in the form of stretch pants with zips and dripping bits of fabric. What appealed about this collection is that though it was groomed to the hilt, with slick little skirts in fish skin, it had a blunt quality of aggression, from those chesty ruffles to the silver shark’s tooth pendants.

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JOHN GALLIANO A jacket with chiffon piping and wide-leg pants.Credit
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

For her first Chloé collection, Clare Waight Keller focused on pleated silk dresses with sunray striped effects or checked inlays. She offered some floral embroidered white cotton, paired with a sleeveless cream blazer or cute shorts, but the puny amount of cotton was disappointing, and too much of the collection seemed cut on a straight line, so that the shapes were repetitive. Ms. Keller has bumped up the Chloé woman’s age — not a bad thing in itself, but you want to see her be a little more curious, and a lot less conventionally straight, in her next collections.

This summer, at the Hermès workshops, I met Pascale Mussard, who has been involved in the family firm for three decades and now leads Petit h, a project that turns leftover materials into new objects. Ms. Mussard was wearing a long white dress in India linen, and I thought: Why can’t Hermès do things like this?

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CHLOÉ a spring purse.Credit
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

In a way, Christophe Lemaire did this season. If you saw his first collection, last February, you could imagine that a pickax might be necessary to break through the cashmere layers and ethnic references, which by now, thankfully, I don’t recall. It was a simple case of too-muchness.

But this time Mr. Lemaire lightened up everything except the palette, which went from calm white to delectably intense orange, yellow, ink blue and ultra-purple. He had skirts and breezy short caftans in ivory linen with faggoted hems, sleeveless kimono coats, a burnt orange suede tunic and a graceful mid-calf skirt in gathered black cotton worn with an offbeat geometric patterned vest and a white cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves.

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CHLOÉ macarons offered before the show.Credit
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Still, the nonchalance felt stagy, not helped by the fact that the models were apparently instructed to walk with a smiling-faced delicacy, their feet in a weird hybrid of sandal and leather anklet. And while it’s nice that Mr. Lemaire doesn’t throw the Hermès luxury in your face, there remains something opaque about his ideas.

The Galliano show got its freshness from lingerie whites — coats, ruffled crepe blouses — and a light-blue jacket with rounded sleeves and shoulders that was piped in printed chiffon and worn with wide creamy pants. It didn’t matter that the designer, Bill Gaytten, stuck to the Galliano script (complete with crushed Mary Poppins hats). At least he offered feminine shapes that were different from the repetitive, patterned pleats-please narrative for spring.